Their long friendship had become strained in recent years as they bickered over whether to tailgate and who would drive, so when it looked as if Douglas Warlick would not come through with Bears tickets this year, Donald Ramsell did what came naturally — he sued.
“He’s a lawyer. I’m a lawyer,” said Ramsell, a Wheaton DUI lawyer who is representing himself. “The courthouse is where you go when you have a dispute. I’m not going to let somebody muscle me out of my tickets.”
Warlick, a Geneva family practice attorney who has held the tickets since 1985, was stunned when a reporter told him of the lawsuit. He said Ramsell “didn’t say boo” about the dispute when he ran into him at a recent DuPage County Bar Association event.
“I’m still in shock — that’s so obnoxious, so immature,” he said. “He could’ve just picked up the phone. I think ‘sad’ is an appropriate word for somebody who does something like that.”
The suit Ramsell filed May 30 in DuPage County Circuit Court seeks a temporary restraining order barring his former friend from transferring or selling the two season tickets Ramsell has bought from him during the last four years. The tickets have more than doubled in value since the team’s Super Bowl appearance last year.
A Bears spokesman, who declined to comment on details of the case, said this is the first time he’s heard of a fan suing another fan over season tickets.
It started out friendly. Warlick often treated Ramsell to games, so in 2002, after Solider Field was renovated, Warlick invited his longtime friend to split the $10,000 application fee for four new seat licenses in exchange for the right to buy half the tickets from him, both men say.
The two experienced litigators had nothing more than a verbal agreement.
“That’s where there’s egg on my face,” Ramsell said. Warlick said he was dealing with a friend and saw no need to put anything down on paper.
Fans who want to buy Bears season tickets must first buy seat licenses, which give them the right to buy tickets. Warlick had held four tickets in his name since 1985, so they remained in his name.
But the men began arguing. Their friendship suffered another blow after Warlick was arrested at Soldier Field in 2005 on public trespassing charges.
Warlick called his arrest a “misunderstanding.” He declined to provide details, but he said the charges were dropped, which court records confirm.
However, Ramsell mentioned the arrest in the lawsuit, saying he feared the tickets could be revoked, leaving him with nothing. He also said Warlick did not contact him this year at the usual time about paying for the 2007 tickets, so he figured Warlick wasn’t going to give him the chance to buy them this year.
Ramsell said the lawsuit follows several years of disagreements. “You have expected me to pick you up at your house and drop you off at your house for every game, as if I am some sort of limo service,” Ramsell wrote in a Jan. 31 letter sent before the lawsuit was filed. In the letter, Ramsell proposes that Warlick transfer two tickets into Ramsell’s name, sell all four and buy new ones on the open market, or put the four tickets into a legal partnership with Ramsell.
“Don, I regret the apparent loss of friendship associated with your certified letter, but I am a ‘die-hard’ Bears fan,” Warlick wrote in a letter the next day. “I will never sell my precious Bears Season Tickets.”
